The Detective's Daughter

52

Sunday, 23 January 2011

At midday Jack was in Stanwell.

He walked each page of the A–Z in order and, apart from one slip, did not skip numbers to get to the areas he preferred. He did not impose significance on numbers where there was none. It would not help to return to what he had missed, the secret would be apparent only if he faithfully traversed the path of each journey. A true reader understands that the only way to appreciate a story is to read each word, from the start to the end.

Over the months Jack had been soaked by rain and stung by sleet; he had greeted streaks of dawn light as he took a left or a right to stay on the path drawn. He’d slithered on footpaths, avoided sick, dog shit and litter. Wind tore at his clothes as he battled across grass, tarmac and the wasteland depicted on his map as blank space. Walking, Jack was never somewhere.

He was nowhere.

One by one he had walked the pages – and today he was on the last one.

He had passed the Hammersmith and City exit minutes before Stella was about to go down the steps after her visit to Martin Cashman. Neither saw the other, although they were so close. When a man stepped in front of Jack, forcing him to give way and without apology ran down the stairs, Jack considered going after him. The man’s indifference was what he looked for in the perfect Host. But Jack had spent months working towards this final journey in the atlas; he would not change plans.

He wished he had not told Stella about the street atlas. She was a police officer’s daughter; she relied on evidence, not fanciful thinking; he worried it had put her off.

Before he found the book, Jack had not had much use for an A–Z. In his driver’s cab the tracks were his guide. But over time the atlas had offered him another way to achieve his quest.

The marked-out routes were a set of instructions: the area of Inner and Greater London was divided into a grid of 144 squares. The numbered grids followed the western reading pattern: from left to right, then down to the next line. A convention broken at square 142, which along with 143 and 144, was tagged on to the left of the grid covering Uxbridge, West Drayton and Stanwell respectively. Of these districts, only Uxbridge was familiar to Jack because it had an Underground station.

Jack had been walking for two and a half hours but did not know this because when he was tracing a route he wore no watch. He did not need to measure time. He had passed the new Terminal Five building at Heathrow, which in his 1995 deluxe edition was described as the ‘Proposed Terminal Five Development Area’. He was on Clockhouse Lane.

This was long and for the most part straight, a line of tarmac demarcated by snow heaped in the gutters. He stayed on the left where he could make out a pavement beneath the snow. He kept hard by the link fence to avoid spray from speeding cars. He had not met another pedestrian but was accompanied by a set of footprints going in the same direction. Whoever had passed this way was not in sight.

The top of the fence was strung with three lengths of barbed wire. On both sides of the lane was scrubland; today a landscape of white mounds. The map depicted a lake, and squares representing warehouses. At the junction with the A30 there were playing fields and an industrial estate. He had seen them; he did not stray outside the pen-line.

He reached the white of grass surrounding a lake glittering in the thin light, with trees punctuating the shoreline: vestiges of countryside that would disappear as the city encroached.

He was on the last grid square, the pen-line, firm and competent, went along Clockhouse Lane and trailed off a square with no coordinate. When he stepped off it, he would be invisible.

One step, two step and he was gone.

Jack found himself by metal railings, through which were tennis courts, their nets slackened within a wire enclosure. He unfastened a gate and crunched over to a bench. Clearing off snow, he sat down.

Around page twenty Jack had begun to prepare properly for his expeditions. He carried a flask of hot milk and honey and, since he had met Stella, a packet of digestive biscuits. He was strict about where he stopped; there must be no one nearby and if there were, he moved to avoid conversation. He must not be remembered.

He had once loved snow, but now it was his enemy. Stealthy and insistent, it blotted out clues and signs while giving away his own actions. Lost in his coat, the collar up, his damp hair slicked to his head, Jack sipped his milk, savouring the sweetness, but today it did not work its magic. He was not resting in the middle of a journey full of promise, he was at the end of the line and did not know where to go next.

Stella was right, his conviction that the atlas would give him a clue to his mother’s killer was absurd; he was wasting time. He chucked the rest of the milk on to the ground and it hissed a hole, like a wound, in the snow.

He leafed to page 144. In the top right-hand corner – so small he had initially mistaken it for scribble to check if a pen was working – he saw: ‘242’.

Jack rummaged in his pocket for his timetable. He found this week’s shift pattern. The second set number for his last train on Wednesday had been ‘242’. The train Stella boarded on the day he told her he was at school with Kate Rokesmith’s little boy. Was that a sign?

He fitted the little book back into his pocket and felt something cold and hard. His amulet. Even in the flat light the glass glowed green. Suddenly he remembered: that Mummy had tried to swap it for his engine, telling him it would bring him luck. He had insisted on taking the steam engine. As he tried to gather the loose strands, tenuous images dissolved back into the mists of the past.

He stared at page 144, willing it to give up its secret, but perhaps the secret was not his to know. It belonged to a stranger. Perhaps some mysteries were destined to remain unsolved. Jack was overwhelmed with futility; nothing could alter the main event. It had happened and that was that.

Nothing will bring her back.

He would have to look for real signs to get him to a station. He was off the map and could not go back the way he had come.

Still clutching the green glass, he put it to his lips. His mother had been right: about good luck; the talisman had saved his life.

He willed the A–Z to give up its message and as if his wish was granted he saw a wardrobe in his mind, but, trying to hold it, the image evaporated.

Jack had not told Stella that when he found the man who had murdered his mother, he would kill him.